FATHER GREGOR (YOHANN) MENDEL

1822

July 22, Monday: The British Parliament enacted one of the 1st animal rights laws, the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act intended to protect farm animals.

After three months devoted to his music, Gioachino Rossini departed from Vienna because Prince Metternich, a great admirer, has engaged him as the “official composer” for the Verona Conference (coming up in November).

In Heinzendorf in what was then Lower Silesia, Johann Mendel was born. His father Anton Mendel (1789- 1857) was a peasant veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. His mother Rosine née Schwirtlich (1794-1862) had already given birth to three daughters, two of whom had died. The surviving daughter, Veronica, was two years old. GREGOR MENDEL

The botanist Stephen Elliott wrote to his nephew William Elliott about the recent conspiracy by a Charleston Bible teacher, Denmark “No one thought to describe his face” Vesey, to free the slaves of South Carolina.

SERVILE INSURRECTION The Boston house known as the Beehive was a 2-story dwelling with a sharp roof, with its end toward the street. This house was called the Beehive house because it had many little windows, making it look from the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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outside very like a honeycomb. The lady of the house was a Mrs. Cooper, who had two daughters and many female boarders. On this evening at about 9PM a crowd of about 200 men, attired in various outlandish costumes and with well-blackened faces, carrying various work implements, suddenly came around the corner accompanied by a band. It took them approximately ten minutes to virtually rip this house to shreds. The first thing they did was turn all the featherbeds inside out from the windows so that the neighborhood took on the resemblance of winter. They then proceeded with a will to utterly demolish the furniture, the walls, the roof, the frame, everything about the house, their intent being not to leave any two sticks fastened together or any stick larger than a door hingepin. As they departed they set a fire in some brimstone, feathers, and wool rags — so that the house lot not only seemed like a trash heap, and looked like winter, but smelled like Hell itself. (So, where were the Boston authorities? Elsewhere.)

1824

Franz Cyril Napp (1792-1867) was elected abbot of the Augustinian monastery in Brno (the monastery Gregor Mendel would enter in 1843). Napp had a strong interest in agriculture and would eventually be named president of the Moravian Agricultural Society.

1833

At this point 11 years of age, Johann Mendel was enrolled in the Piarist secondary school in Leipnik, a neighboring village of Heinzendorf. Here, as in primary school, he would exhibit great academic ability. GREGOR MENDEL

1834

Having demonstrated much academic promise, Johann Mendel was admitted to the Gymnasium in Troppau, Silesia (now the Czech Republic town of Opava, home to Silesian University). The fees at Troppau being difficult for the Mendels to afford, Johann was enrolled as on “half rations.” GREGOR MENDEL

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1836

Franz Diebl (1770-1859) put out a two-volume textbook, ABHANDLUNGEN AUS DER LANDWIRTSCHAFTSKUNDE FÜR LANDWIRTHE, BESONDERS ABER FÜR DIEJENIGEN, WELCHE SICH DER ERLERNUNG DIESER WISSENSCHAFT WIDMEN. II. VON DEM PFLANZENBAU, in which he alleged that the primary method for the improvement of plants was artificial pollination. Gregor Mendel would in 1846 attend Diebl’s lectures on pomiculture and viticulture at the Philosophical Institute in Brno. BOTANIZING

1838

The father of the Mendel family, Anton, was seriously injured, so much so as to have to give up farming. Johann Mendel decided against returning home to take over the farm, which would therefore pass to his sister Veronica’s husband, Alois Sturm. It becoming necessary for Johann to support himself and his studies, he would do so by tutoring privately. GREGOR MENDEL

1839

Shortly after Pentecost, Johann Mendel became seriously ill and left school to recover at home. He would not return to Troppau until September. Despite this absence, in the following year he would be admitted to the highest class in the school. GREGOR MENDEL

1840

Johann Mendel went to the University of Olmütz (now Olomouc in the Czech Republic) to study philosophy, hoping to support himself by tutoring. He wasn’t able to find work as a tutor, and once again fell ill. He returned home for the remainder of the year. GREGOR MENDEL

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1841

In central Europe, Johann Mendel’s sister Theresia relinquished part of her dowry so that Johann might continue his studies at Olmütz. He returned to the City, where he was this time able to find work as a tutor. He would study philosophy at the Philosophical Institute for the following two years. GREGOR MENDEL

1843

Johann Mendel’s financial circumstances remained a serious problem, and he discussed his desire to continue his studies with the Professor of Physics at the University of Olmütz, Friedrich Franz. Franz recommended that Mendel enter the Augustinian monastery in Brünn (Brno). Franz, who had lived at the monastery at one time, would write a letter in support of Mendel’s candidacy, and Mendel would be accepted in late September. On October 9, he would enter the monastery as a novice and take the name “Gregor.” GREGOR MENDEL

1845

Gregor Mendel began his studies at the Brünn Theological College. In this first year he would study Hebrew, ecclesiastical history, and ecclesiastical archaeology; in the following year he would be studying Greek, exegesis, and ecclesiastical law.

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1846

In addition to his studies at the Theological College, with the approval and encouragement of the abbot of the monastery at Brünn, Franz Cyrill Napp (1792-1867), Gregor Mendel attended lectures on fruit-growing and viticulture. Napp, who had written a manual on plant breeding, was also chairman of the Pomological Association, and served on the committee of the local Agricultural Society. The lectures were delivered at the Brünn Philosophical Institute by Professor Franz Diebl (1770-1859), who was well-known for his articles and books about plant breeding.

From this year until 1864, the 5 volumes of Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s SPECIES FILICUM (THE SPECIES OF FERNS).

Some of the conservationist insights which would be presented in the following year by George Perkins Marsh before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, Vermont were elaborated in George B. Emerson’s A REPORT ON THE TREES AND SHRUBS GROWING NATURALLY IN THE FORESTS OF MASSACHUSETTS. PUBLISHED AGREEABLY TO AN ORDER OF THE LEGISLATURE, BY THE COMMISSIONERS ON THE ZOOLOGICAL AND BOTANICAL SURVEY OF THE STATE was published in Boston

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(Dutton and Wentworth, State Printers, No. 37, Congress Street) with illustrations by Isaac Sprague.

EMERSON’S TREES/SHRUBS

A copy of this would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library and a snippet from page 511 about the “flexibility, lightness, and resiliency” of the wood of the Tilia Americana, also called the basswood, or lime, or linden tree, would find its way into A WEEK.

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A WEEK: (September 2, Monday, 1839) The bass, Tilia Americana, also called the lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the material of the fisherman’s matting, and the ropes and peasant’s shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and for a kind of paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of its wood, “on account of its flexibility, lightness, and resiliency.” It was once much used for carving, and is still in demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its flowers is said to be preferred to any other. Its leaves are in some countries given to cattle, a kind of chocolate has been made of its fruit, a medicine has been prepared from an infusion of its flowers, and finally, the charcoal made of its wood is greatly valued for gunpowder.

CHOCOLATE

1847

August 4, day: Gregor Mendel was ordained a priest. He was 25 years old. He would continue his studies at the Theological College, and attend lectures at the Philosophical Institute.

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1848

Nicholas Marcellus Hentz relocated from Tuskeegee, Alabama to Columbus, Georgia.

Gregor Mendel, in his 4th year of studies at the Theological College, attended additional lectures on agriculture at the Brünn Philosophical Institute. The teacher was Professor Franz Diebl (1770-1859). In June, Mendel received a certificate of completion from the College, and in early August he became a parish priest in the collegiate church at Altbrünn.

The Boston Society of Natural History, which had been organized in 1830 out of what remained of the Linnaean Society that had flourished from 1813 to 1823, moved into its new quarters on Mason Street in the building known as the Massachusetts Medical College. PROCEEDINGS, FOR 1848

Up to this point Professor Jacob Bigelow’s FLORULA BOSTONIENSIS, A COLLECTION OF PLANTS OF BOSTON AND ITS VICINITY had been the standard flora for the New England region. With the publication of Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard College Asa Gray, M.D.’s A MANUAL OF THE BOTANY OF THE

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NORTHERN UNITED STATES, FROM NEW ENGLAND TO WISCONSIN AND SOUTH TO OHIO AND PENNSYLVANIA INCLUSIVE, (THE MOSSES AND LIVERWORTS BY WM. S. SULLIVANT,) ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE NATURAL SYSTEM; WITH AN INTRODUCTION, CONTAINING A REDUCTION OF THE GENERA TO THE LINNÆAN ARTIFICIAL CLASSES AND ORDERS, OUTLINES OF THE ELEMENTS OF BOTANY, A GLOSSARY, ETC. (Boston & Cambridge:

James Munroe and Company, London: John Chapman),1 Professor Bigelow’s contribution had been made

1. This volume would be owned by Henry Thoreau and by Ellery Channing, and Channing’s copy, with his typical scrawling all over it, is now at the Concord Free Public Library.

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obsolete.

MANUAL OF THE BOTANY

In this year Professor Gray also put out the 1st volume of his GENERA OF THE PLANTS OF THE UNITED STATES (you can now purchase a polyester necktie, guaranteed not to eat you alive, printed with Isaac Sprague’s illustration of the Venus Flytrap Dionæa muscipula from this volume).

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1849

September: After a difficult year as a parish priest at Altbrünn, and although he had no experience as a schoolteacher, Gregor Mendel was offered, and happily accepted, a teaching appointment in the Gymnasium at Znaim (Znojmo). Abbot Napp was instrumental in securing this unusual appointment. Botanist F. C. Gärtner (1772- 1850) published VERSUCHE UND BEOBACHTUNGEN ÜBER DIE BASTARDERZEUGUNG IM PFLANZENREICHE. The book described thousands of experiments, many involving the production of hybrids, on more than 500 species of plants. Mendel would study this book in detail when he attended the University of Vienna in the early 1850s, and would cite the book in the opening of his paper of 1865.

1850

The Philadelphia industrialist Andrew M. Eastwick, as a poor child, had whiled away some Sunday afternoons in the Bartram Garden, which he appropriately termed a “paradise.” By this year he had become wealthy enough to purchase this botanical garden in order to preserve it.

Professor Asa Gray revised his BOTANICAL TEXTBOOK.

After a successful year of teaching at the Gymnasium in Znaim (Znojmo), Gregor Mendel took a teaching examination that would allow him to secure a permanent appointment. The exam consisted of two essays, one on the physical and chemical properties of air and the other on geology. Flunking, Mendel was told that he might retake the exam after a period of not less than a year. When C.F. Napp inquired of one of the examiners, the Baron von Baumgartner, as to Mendel’s performance on the exam, the examiner suggested that Mendel be sent to the University of Vienna to study the natural sciences.

1851

Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s VICTORIA REGIA.

Gregor Mendel began a 2-year program of study at the University of Vienna. He would take a variety of courses and study with, or attend the lectures of, among others, Professor of Plant Physiology Franz Unger whose BOTANISCHE BRIEFE would in 1852 argue for the evolution of (i.e. non-fixity) of species, Andreas von Ettinghausen, whose course on experimental method and physical apparatus likely drew on his 1826 writings on combinatorial analysis and 1842 writings on the organization of experiments, and Christian Johann Doppler, a well-regarded lecturer on experimental physics.

Hofmeister described alternation of generations in higher plants.

Henry Thoreau read in Zoölogy and in Botany:

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• William Bartram and John Bartram JOHN BARTRAM’S BOOK WM. BARTRAM’S BOOK • Peter Kalm, a disciple of Carolus Linnaeus • the Baron Cuvier, teacher of Louis Agassiz • Loudon, apostle of the Linnaean “artificial” system of botanical classification • Stoever, the biographer of Carolus Linnaeus • Pultenay, a Linnaean • Carolus Linnaeus (in February 1852) • Alphonse Louis Pierre Pyramus de Candolle, apostle of the Linnaean “artificial” system of botanical classification (later) • Louis Agassiz and Augustus A. Gould’s revised edition of their 1848 PRINCIPLES OF ZOÖLOGY: TOUCHING THE STRUCTURE, DEVELOPMENT, DISTRIBUTION AND NATURAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE RACES OF ANIMALS, LIVING AND EXTINCT; WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES. PT. I. COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY AGASSIZ & GOULD 1851

CAPE COD: The Greeks would not have called the ocean or unfruitful, though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of modern science, for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the land, is the principal seat of life,”– though not of vegetable life. Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme limit of flowering plants”; but they add, that “experiments of dredging in very deep water have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a desert”; –“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor, “merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,” says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after having lived in its lower stage on dry land,” but as in the case of the tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water on its way to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as , or unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of continents.”

PIERRE JEAN ÉDOUARD DESOR AGASSIZ & GOULD CHARLES DARWIN

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1853

Professor Asa Gray issued a 4th edition of his THE BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK, AND INTRODUCTION TO SCIENTIFIC BOTANY, BOTH STRUCTURAL AND SYSTEMATIC. FOR COLLEGES, SCHOOLS, AND PRIVATE STUDENTS, complete with 1,200 engravings on wood (NY: George P. Putnam & Co.) BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK

This would find its way into Henry Thoreau’s personal library.

Gregor Mendel returned to Brno, and published the first of two short papers in the journal of the Zoologisch- botanischer Verein in Vienna, where he is a member. The papers each concerned crop damage by insects, and one dealt specifically with the Bruchus pisi species of beetle that a few years later would undermine some of Mendel’s Pisum experiments.

In this year the physicist Christian Johann Doppler, whose lectures on experimental physics Mendel had attended at the University of Vienna, died in Venice.

Eucalyptus was introduced into California from Australia.

Albert Kellogg (a South Carolinan who had studied at Kentucky’s Transylvania College, and then gone to San Francisco and opened a pharmacy) and six colleagues established the California Academy of Sciences. He brought to a meeting of the group some specimens and stories he had heard from A.T. Dowd about a giant new conifer in the foothills of the Sierra range, southeast of Sacramento. William Lobb, who was at the meeting, left immediately for the area, collecting seed, mature cones, vegetative shoots, and two seedlings. He returned to San Francisco and quickly left for England. The two saplings were planted at the Veitch nursery in Exeter. John Lindley described the new species that December in Gardener’s Chronicles as Wellingtonia gigantea. The name eventually accepted for this tree was Sequoiadendron giganteum. PLANTS

1854

Gregor Mendel received a teaching appointment at the Oberrealschule in Brno, where he would successfully teach natural history and physics for the following 16 years. He published his 2d paper, which concerns the beetle Bruchus pisi, on crop damage.

Professor Sir William Jackson Hooker’s A CENTURY OF FERNS. BOTANIZING

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1855

In Europe, Gregor Mendel applied for a 2d time to take the written teaching examination that would allow him to have a permanent teaching appointment. He would travel to Vienna to take the exam in 1856, but again would not pass.

In England, Charles Darwin began to think about the work he needed to do to produce his “big book,” an exhaustive record of the evidence for his development theory (this would to be replaced by a much shorter explanation-minus-evidence titled ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE 2 PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE).

In America, William Lloyd Garrison persuaded the New England Anti-Slavery Convention to witness a spiritual communication between John Orvis and a dead friend. The Massachusetts public school system began a long process of reforms dictated by the state government, that there were to be no more distinctions of color or religion. Garrison seized the opportunity to point out that this revolution had begun “in the heart of the solitary individual ... loving the right in all things, and having faith in the triumph of what is just and true ... and by and by, the little leaven leavens the whole lump, and in this way the world is to be redeemed.”

1856

Gregor Mendel appeared in Vienna to attempt for the 2d time the written teaching examination that would allow him to have a permanent teaching appointment. He became ill upon seeing the first question on the exam sheet. In this year he began the experiments with Pisum that he would be reporting in his famed paper of 1865. During the following seven years, he would be growing thousands of plants and using artificial pollination and selective breeding to investigate the production of hybrids and their patterns of inheritance. Mendel also began in this year a series of meteorological studies, and would be publishing a paper on the subject in 1863.

1863

Gregor Mendel’s paper on meteorology.

2. Darwin’s “big book” would not see print until the 1980s.

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1865

February 8, Wednesday: Gregor Mendel read from his paper “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” to a meeting of the Natural History Society of Brünn (Brno).

Clara Schumann wrote to Johannes Brahms that she had undergone treatment for an injury to her right hand (the treatment required that the hand be plunged into the carcass of a recently slaughtered animal).

March 8, Wednesday: Friend Moses Brown’s residence in Providence, Rhode Island near what is now the corner of Humboldt Avenue and Wayland Avenue, called “Elmgrove,” burned to the ground.

Gregor Mendel read more from his paper “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” to a meeting of the Natural History Society of Brünn (Brno).

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April 18, Tuesday: Gregor Mendel sent the results of his 7-year study of peas, containing the basic laws of genetics he had discovered in his garden at the Brunn (Brno) Monastery, to eminent botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli in München (Nägeli’s cool reception would help convince this researcher to abandon the project).

Opposing commanders signed a “memorandum” at Durham Station, North Carolina calling for an armistice by all armies in the field.

1866

The 4th edition of Charles Darwin’s ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE PRESERVATION OF FAVORED SPECIES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

In this edition Darwin came out against what we might term “constant-speedism,” by inserting the following sentence: Many species once formed never undergo any further change...; and the periods, during which species have undergone modification, though long as measured by years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which they retain the same form. (We can see from this that Professor Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “punctuated equilibrium” is not nearly as un-Darwinian as some of its vocal opponents have been asserting it to be.)

Gregor Mendel sent a copy of his paper describing the basic patterns of inheritance and his understanding of the hereditary nature of variation between individuals in a population to the Linnaean Society in London, where the pages would remain uncut (it is startling that this work in botany, though highly complementary to Darwin’s concepts, did not emerge for general scientific discussion until after 1900).

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1900

Simultaneous rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws of genetic inheritance, by Hugo de Vries and Carl Erich Correns (De Vries made his discovery while studying the common American evening primrose Oenothera lamarckiana, originally named for Jean Baptiste Lamarck, that he had found growing in the disturbed soil of a “waste space” in his back yard; Correns had been a student of Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, the eminent botanist whose incomprehension had discouraged Mendel from continuing his work, and discovered that Mendel had in fact been correct in his evaluation of the genetics of the hawkweed Hieracium).

A copy of Mendel’s paper on genetics was discovered in the library of the Linnean Society in London. The pages were uncut.3 EUGENICS

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: October 17, 2013

3. There is a persistent textbook-tale that this unperused copy of the paper had been discovered in Charles Darwin’s library. No evidence supports this.

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.

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